sight--
With _that_ for your only reason!
Nine hundred and ninety-nine can't bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side
To the gallows-foot--and after!

Simple Simon

Cattiwow came down the steep lane with his five-horse timber-tug. He
stopped by the woodlump at the back gate to take off the brakes. His
real name was Brabon, but the first time the children met him, years and
years ago, he told them he was 'carting wood,' and it sounded so exactly
like 'cattiwow' that they never called him anything else.

'Hi!' Una shouted from the top of the woodlump, where they had been
watching the lane. 'What are you doing? Why weren't we told?'

'They've just sent for me,' Cattiwow answered. 'There's a middlin' big
log sticked in the dirt at Rabbit Shaw, and'--he flicked his whip back
along the line--'so they've sent for us all.'

Dan and Una threw themselves off the woodlump almost under black
Sailor's nose. Cattiwow never let them ride the big beam that makes the
body of the timber-tug, but they hung on behind while their teeth
thuttered.

The wood road beyond the brook climbs at once into the woods, and you
see all the horses' backs rising, one above another, like moving
stairs. Cattiwow strode ahead in his sackcloth woodman's petticoat,
belted at the waist with a leather strap; and when he turned and
grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap
was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his
neck. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in
their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their
legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew
whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, or jar them back
again.

At the top of Rabbit Shaw half-a-dozen men and a team of horses stood
round a forty-foot oak log in a muddy hollow. The ground about was
poached and stoached with sliding hoof-marks, and a wave of dirt was
driven up in front of the butt.

'What did you want to bury her for this way?' said Cattiwow. He took his
broad-axe and went up the log tapping it.

'She's sticked fast,' said 'Bunny' Lewknor, who managed the other team.

Cattiwow unfastened the five wise horses from the tug. They cocked their
ears forward, looked, and shook themselves.

'I believe Sailor knows,' Dan whispered to Una.

'He do,' said a man behind